Many advertisers want to know more about the AdWords Quality Score. This isn't surprising, considering that it's a factor in determining both the ad rank and minimum cost-per-click bid for keywords. Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query.
To start off, it's useful to understand why Google factors relevance into the rank of an ad. To align incentives and foster a healthy and sustainable advertising system, we had to develop a system where users continue to look to ads for relevant information, advertisers continue to find high quality leads, and site publishers continue to monetize high quality content. Because the system rewards relevant ads, users can find exactly what they want and are more likely to do business with you, our advertisers. Next time they are looking for something, they will probably consider clicking on an ad again, giving you another chance to get their business.
There are five major components that go into the Quality Score that determines the minimum cost-per-click bid: ad relevance, keyword relevance, account performance, landing page quality, and landing page load time. Since Google doesn't have any preconceived notion of what makes a good ad, we let our users vote with their clicks. By looking at the historical clickthrough rate (CTR), we can tell when users found ads relevant, and this democratic process helps us set the Quality Score of the keyword. The very first minimum bid for a keyword in your account (before any CTR information is accrued) is determined by how other advertisers have performed for this keyword. By combining this baseline historical data with information from your account, such as historical account performance and the CTR of your other ads, we set a starting minimum bid. As soon as you start accruing your own CTR data for the keyword, we will adjust your minimum bid to reflect your performance.
As soon as you link a new landing page to your ads, we will begin evaluating this page on a regular basis for its quality and load time. If we notice that our users are not finding what they expected on the landing page, we will raise the minimum cost-per-click bid for those keywords and landing pages. We also recently announced that page load times will factor into Quality Score because we believe that users want to get to your site as quickly as possible and excessively long page load times are detrimental to the user experience.
I hope this brief glimpse into the Quality Score helps you create more relevant ads. For more on Quality Score, including how to view it in your account, please visit: http://www.google.com/aw/qs
A quick recap, these are the five components Google AdWords base your Quality Score on:
- Ad Relevance
- Keyword Relevance
- Account Performance
- Landing Page Quality
- Landing Page Load Time
Please note that these are probably not the only ways they calculate your Quality Score and minimum bids but coming directly from Google, these are surely huge factors you should consider if you didn't already know this or may have neglected.
Alex on May 29, 2008 at 9:11pm
This is interesting.. and many thanks for posting.
However, it does confirm one of my "bones of contention" with the quality score algorithm - that quality score is judged according to CTR.
The problem with this is that I don't necessarily want ads with the highest click through rate. Why? Because clickthrough is no guarantee of conversions.
Put another way, I could use sensationalist tactics to drive up my CTR - but this would have a negative effect on conversions. I want to word my ads so as to attract qualified buyers, not so as to get the most clicks.
Thus, Quality score rating puts me in a situation where I feel as though I have to either get lower conversions in order to get higher quality score, or get higher conversions but a lower quality score. Does this make sense? Am I on the right track here?
Judging by the words "If we notice that our users are not finding what they expected on the landing page" - does this suggest to you that Google might be measuring the bounce rate of landing pages in addition to the factors named above? On Google's own pages explaining quality score, there are statements like "how your site interacts with a visitor's computer" which suggest that their actual metrics are more complex than the 5 factors named in the above article. What do you think? "Landing page quality" is such a vague term, be good to know much more about the actual specifics of their system. There's much more info in this regard on http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46675
It's interesting to note the effect of page load times tho, I didn't know that. Image compression rules!
ps Looking forward to testing Prosper202 one of these fine days!! I'll post a full report on my blog / in an article for sure.
AN
Steven on May 30, 2008 at 4:02am
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your comment. I complete understand what you're getting at. I don't know how I feel at the moment regarding the CTR being part of the QS calculation. However, on a personal level, I want a high CTR contrary to your argument. While it is true that high CTR doesn't equal conversions (high or low), it does equate to the first part of the overall equation.
The first and foremost thing any person wants is traffic/customers/visitors/users. Put it any way you want but traffic is pretty much god in any given business. The more traffic, the more opportunities. That said, if you can get a high CTR meaning high traffic, you can focus on the next part of the equation and turn them into conversions even if they weren't conversions before. As long as you have the customer, you have a fighting chance to make the conversion happen. Zero to low CTR mean zero to low customer count equal low conversion no matter how you look at it.
While it is true you don't want high CTR with zero to little conversions, it is also true that often times, if you have the high CTR and the conversion doesn't add up, it means you have more work to do to take it up to the next level.